A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 46A. Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966)

Now to go back to some unfinished business....namely, the second Doctor feature film starring Peter Cushing as the Doctor.

Police constable Thomas (Bernard Cribbens, a comedian perhaps better known to NuWho fans as Donna’s Uncle Wilf) fails to stop a jewel heist and heads for the nearest police box to call things in...except the police box he runs into is the Tardis.  This Doctor is still hanging with his much younger version of Susan (Roberta Tovey) and his...niece?..Louise (Jill Curzon) and they’re mid trip to...well, 2150 ‘London’ while it’s under Dalek occupation.  The rest of the film follows the original serial from here on in more of less.  Obviously, there’s no romance subplot with Susan and David (Ray Brooks)--although I’m rather surprised they didn’t try to pair David up with Louise who, let’s be honest, does nothing during this eighty-eight minutes.  Sadly, there’s no Syltheen Monsta but there is a underground resistance led by Dortmann (Godfrey Quigley), who sacrifices himself, and there’s a slimy profiteer, here played by Philip Madoc, who will become a frequent guest star on the classic Who series.

The biggest thing that sets this apart from the original serial besides the technicolor is that Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150AD does no location shooting.  Everything is set bound with mattes, and it really shows in its generic feel.  One of the reasons ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ worked so well was the immediacy of it, as recognizable places in London were shown under Dalek rule; this movie loses that immediacy.  Viewing it feels more like watching a stage show rather than a film.

I will say this much, though--even though at this point he was known as a comedian, Bernard Cribbens actually comes off real well as our Ian stand-in.  One scene involving Tom disguised as a Roboman aside, Cribbens plays this straight and comes off very practical and no-nosense, accepting all the strangeness around him and focusing on his police training to keep from freaking out.  If they had made Tom a regular companion in the series, I not only would have accepted it, I would have enjoyed seeing him interact with Hartnell*.

The budget does allow for some upgrading--I remember little Tom being real freaked by this version of the Robomen when I first saw this film on WNBC, and they are kind of neat in a low budget sort of way--but by suiting them up in black vinyl and ginchy double-goggles, they lose something.  The Roboman of the serial, because they looked hastily put together, emphasized the beaten down aspect of this world whereas this Robomen seem more like actual aliens rather than
brainwashed (literally in the story’s case, figuratively in the case of the Stormtroopers who the Robomen were stand-ins for) human beings.

Overall, I found this viewing of the film sort of underwhelming.  The Doctor is backgrounded a bit more than I’d like (something I think is made obvious by the movie’s marketing in ‘66), and I never get the sense of the Cushing Doctor being as smart and clever as the Hartnell Doctor.  It’s just ‘blah,’ and it doesn’t surprise me that the planned third film, based on the serial ‘The Chase,’ was scrapped.

As a whole, these two films remain as curios, and that’s probably how we should approach them.

 *--instead we got the Amazing Plank of Wood named Steven, played by Peter Purves, but we'll get to that soon enough...